Tuesday, July 24, 2012

Spiderman's almost amazing reboot

When it comes to superhero stories, I'm a real fan. Specifically Marvel syndicate's Spiderman and X-men have been my favorites since I was a child. I remember how I connected to unbreakable and self-healing Wolverine and the nerdy, but loud-mouthed Peter Parker alias Spiderman.

I think I've seen most of the Marvel universe's movie adaptions, even the infamousThe Punisher (rated 5.3/10 on IMDB) starring Dolph Lundgren, the Swedish megastar of late 80's and early 90's. Punisher's only connection to comics were characters with a same name, which can not be regarded as a plus for an antihero, who brutally kills mobsters without mercy, and seems to be enjoying justice as a revenge only served with as much as pain as a man can inflict on another.

Marvel has had it share of excellent characters, story arcs and stories shining on the silver screen as well as adaptations which have brought shame to the makers and is solely the main reason I hate big production companies which turn things that should be loved to things that get despised. And in some cases I don't believe the producers are so much interested in artistic integrity as they are of money.

For me, Sam Raimi's Spiderman trilogy should have gotten it's fourth installment produced and I wasn't very happy with the idea of a new Spiderman reboot - specially so soon. But that was just prejudice on my part.

Last weekend I went to see the movie's 3D version. My only disappointment was that the movie didn't let me hate it and rant about it all over the internet, which is my true ranting arena. I could say Andrew Garfield is somehow missing a bit of Tobey Maguire's silent charisma, but he still does a magnificent job as a sarcastic wise guy superhero and a shy but scientifically unique young boy with hormones splashing through his body while he also has to deal with tragic childhood and surviving teens.

*Here starts spoilers* (if you're not familiar with Spiderman comics in full - you might just want to stop here)

With the new Spiderman movie you get introduced to many of the original things that differentiated in Raimi's trilogy. First of all, this time Gwen Stacy is introduced as Peter Parker's first teenage love. Second of all, Spiderman doesn't have a mutation to web. Instead he works on a webbing machine attached to his hands, just like in the original comics. It might have seem like an easier way to explain Spiderman's webbing ability instead of portraiting the process of Peter Parker getting the idea for webcannons.

Also it might have been seen as a great groundshaking idea to introduce Mary Jane (Kirsten Dunst) as the greatest love of Spiderman-Parker, but for someone else it might have felt like the necessary nuisance to keep the story short in a sense that the Spiderman story has been continuing for decades with a big family of characters, which would have been easier to be introduced in a tv-series lasting for several seasons.